Batting for the home team
Sheridan Morley on the success of the British on Broadway
T
his week's announcement of the 2002
Broadway Tony Awards (winners will be known on 2 June) makes it look like another very good year for the home team. Three out of five of the Best Actor nominations go to Alan Bates, Liam Neeson. and Alan Rickman; meanwhile Lindsay Duncan, Helen Mirren and Kate Burton top the female listings; while Howard Davies (for Private Lives), Richard Eyre (for The Crucible) and Trevor Nunn (for Oklahoma!) lead the Best Director categories. Added to all that, the National's Oklahoma! comes in with seven nominations, the recent West End Private Lives with six, the West End's Mamma Alia with five, and the Michael Fray,,n/Jeremy Sams Noises Off, currently on both sides of the Atlantic, with two for the American staging.
On the Great White Way. Oklahoma!, though less admired than it was two years ago at the National, is selling out nightly, as are Ben Bates and his father Alan in a jokey little Turgenev frolic called Fortune's Fool, looking vastly better in New York than it did in Chichester.
The entire Alan Rickman-Lindsay Duncan Private Lives is en route for New York, though no fewer than 17 producers are needed to do what just two managed in London, which gives you some idea of the relative costs involved. Simon Callow is also heading over with his solo Dickens evening. We can still just about claim the original Full Monty, and there's the acclaimed The Crucible with Liam Neeson, Kate Burton and Rupert Graves have brought The Elephant Man back from the grave; while Jeremy Sams has a triumphant Noises Off Yet another National Theatre director (the next) is responsible for a more controversial but still impressive firstever musical staging of the great Hollywood film noir, Sweet Smell of Success.
Several local New York television channels took the opportunity to screen the original 1957 Tony Curtis-Burt Lancaster movie, regular practice over here but apparently something of a scandal on Broadway, though the real cause of lukewarm reviews for Nicholas Hytner's production is, I fear, the old Pal Joey problem — You cannot,' wrote a famous 1940 reviewer of that, 'draw sweet water from a foul well.' The foul well here is, of course,
New York itself, at the height (or the depth) of the Walter Winchell gossipcolumnist plague, and although it could be argued that the strong Marvin HamlischCraig Carnelia score is still not the Broadway answer to Brecht and Weill, John Lithgow is in great form as the feared J,J. Hunsecker, with Brian d'Arey James equally appalling as the rat-like publicist. Nobody to love here, but a lot to admire, not least our own Bob Crowley's brilliantly edgy skyscraper sets.
Alan Alda in QED is a disappointment, yet another attempt in the wake of Proof, and Copenhagen and Beautiful Mind to make science user-friendly to the stalls: Aida settles for a relentlessly lovable quirky professor, and even if you can solve the theorems here, the play simply does not justify the mental exertions required.
But I have saved the best till last: Edward Albee, now (much like Arthur Miller) being taken back to the heartland of the American theatre with a strong sense of guilt about the 30 or so years for which both playwrights were condemned to be prophets without honour or profit anywhere on Broadway, has a new play called The Goat.
What is it about? Well, I hesitate to give you the final gory detail, but essentially it is about a successful and happily married architect who, around his 50th birthday, suddenly falls passionately and carnally in love with, yes, a goat. His family are, understand ably, somewhat put out: 'This is your father,' says his wife, 'he is a good and talented man who happens to be fucking a goat.'
Albee's genius here has been to take what might at worst have been a revuesketch for Oh! Calcutta! and turn it instead into a wise and witty, touching and even tragic account of a man brought low by his inability to stop 'cruising livestock'. Bad taste, perhaps, but in a curious way The Goat leaves you reassured about the resilience of the human spirit in crisis; and in the leading roles both Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruhl give performances which richly deserve to be seen over here.
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